Cops convicted

Transformed

In a case out of the stuff of nightmare, five New Orleans cops were convicted in the killing of unarmed civilians in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One of the most amazing parts of the story is that the shooting spree, that left two unarmed victims dead and four others wounded (one of whom ultimate lost her arm), took place six days after city flooded. Six days! What does that say about the conditions in the area and the authorities? Law and order were clearly on the run, the cops were told that they were responding to a radio call of officers down and under fire at the Danziger Bridge.

Another detail that tells one just how far off of the civic rails things were at that moment in Louisiana, the 5-0 was rolling to the call in a Budget Rental truck. Literally. One of the officers was riding in the back of the box truck carrying his personal AK-47.¹ They jumped from the truck firing. According to reports, a family walking in search of food and supplies, the Bartholomews, ended up on the bridge that September day heading to a supermarket on the other side of the Industrial Canal that bifurcates the 9th Ward. The hail of New Orleans Police Department bullets killed seventeen year-old family friend James Brissette and wounded four other family members.²

Moments later, the cops open fire on two brothers, Lance and Ronald Madison, according to a Justice Department summary, one officer shot the mentally disabled Ronald Madison in the back as he ran away, another cop stomped and kicked him as he was lying on the ground before he died.

This is the small "c" conservative's nightmare, the state, who has its constituent citizens massively outgunned with its governmental arsenal, incidentally, paid for with tax dollars, turns its guns on the people in a climate of fear. This is the case for repealing the Patriot Act and eliminating the Department of Homeland Security. Guns in the hands of the state, while scary, is likely inevitable in a globalized society. Impunity to open fire on the citizenry, the presumption of guilt, is what must be fought at all costs.

In this federal courtroom, the officers ultimately lost when their fellow cops started to go state's evidence on them. As is so often the case, it was the cover-up that got them. Initially, it was not at all clear that the policemen were going to pay for this heinous incident. State of Louisiana murder and attempted murder charges were thrown out against the cops when the Criminal District Court ruled that the state had misused grand jury testimony. In a racially charged case and city, they were greeted by a cheering throng of supporters when they beat the rap.

The Clarion Content does not have enough information to make a definitive stand on one side or the other of this case on the basis of the facts. In a federal court, in front of juror of their peers these men were found guilty. We can only say that we are heartened that justice did not automatically pardon the powerful and armed against the dispossessed and unarmed. The presumption so often goes the other way.

¹Brady Bill anyone?

²After an initial cover-up, in later testimony it was revealed that the officers kept firing at the unarmed family as they cowered behind a bridge abutment. "The police just kept shooting and I just kept feeling myself being hit," testified Susan Bartholomew who lost her right arm.

Confidence declining

From the America is going to H-E-double hockey sticks in a handbasket files, as seen in the USA Today: the percentage of middle-income American families that think it is possible to save for a secure retirement 37% in 2007, only 28% in 2011. Only 28% of American families think it is even possible to save for a secure retirement? The tiderbox is primed.

Youthful Patriots

Spotted this on Texts from Last Night, ahhh, American youth culture.

"Went from writing my paper to watching obamas speech to crushing beers and singing springsteen in a crowd of 100 within 20 minutes. I love this country!" ---from New Hampshire.

Patron saints of PC strike again

The dark forces of political correctness have struck again, once more trumpeting morality over truth. As smarter political commentators than the Clarion Content have noted, these paragons of political correctness set the stage for King George the II and his lackey, the Dick, Cheney. Their willingness to put a moral code above the truth gave King George solid firmament to stand on as he blithely lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, like the PCers he knew what was best for the country, the facts be damned.

Unfortunately, those cardinals of political correctness still haven't learned their lesson. We read this week, in the Huffington Post, where they bludgeoned the President-elect of the American College of Surgeons into resigning, a man who invented the Greenfield Filter, a device that has saved countless lives as a means of preventing blood clots during surgery, a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan, who has written more than 360 scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, 128 book chapters and two textbooks and served on the editorial board of fifteen scientific journals.

His crime? Citing a peer-reviewed scientific study that suggested semen had health and psychological benefits for women.

The sentence in question, "So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolates."

His intention as he told the Detroit Free Press, "The editorial was a review of what I thought was some fascinating new findings related to semen, and the way in which nature is trying to promote a stronger bond between men and women. It impressed me. It seemed as though it was a gift from nature. And so that was the reason for my lighthearted comments..."

The response from the Inquisition on behalf of Political Correctness? You're fired.

What a country!

Reaction

This is what we hope the reaction to Osama bin Laden's death is across all of America. Let us support peace.

Egypt's presumed revolution

As we warned in these pages last month, there was no revolution in Egypt. All the protestors in Tahir Square were able to accomplish was regime change. They got old Hosni Mubarak out and insured that his fat cat son would not succeed him as ruler. The state apparatus did not change. The military remained in charge. Events yesterday in Cario continued to underline this dramatic and disappointing reality.

According the Washington Post, "Angry anti-government demonstrators returned to Tahrir Square late Saturday, some declaring that they were ready to face martyrdom, less than a day after Egypt’s military rulers used force to break up a protesters’ camp in the place where their revolution began. Angry anti-government demonstrators returned to Tahrir Square late Saturday, some declaring that they were ready to face martyrdom, less than a day after Egypt’s military rulers used force to break up a protesters’ camp in the place where their revolution began."

On the ground in Egypt, it is evident that the regime is being run by the same ilk as it has been for more than fifty years, military statists. This is why demonstrators refuse to simply fade away.

Read the whole ugly story here in the Washington Post.

Of course, the regime is backtracking and putting a PR cover into play.

What happened in Egypt...

The Clarion Content is not a fan of seeing United States foreign policy conducted on a strictly pragmatic calculus. We do, however, support a pragmatic understanding of how events on the world stage play out. That is to say, sometimes foreign policy's motives have to be idealist, but interpretations of outcomes and results must be realist.

It is through this lens that we want to note that we strongly agree with George Friedman and Strafor's analysis of events in Egypt in recent weeks.

The week began with an old soldier running Egypt. It ended with different old soldiers running Egypt with even more formal power than Mubarak had. This has caused worldwide shock and awe...We do not want to be killjoys now, since everyone is so excited and happy. But we should point out that, in spite of the crowds, nothing much has really happened yet in Egypt. It doesn’t mean that it won’t, but it hasn’t yet.

An 82-year-old man has been thrown out of office, and his son will not be president. The constitution and parliament are gone and a military junta is in charge. The rest is speculation.

The great majority of the Western media is running around foolishly asserting that there has been a revolution. This wild overclaim only shows the distortion between their hype-skewed lens and events on the ground. The Wikipedia entry on these events, for example, is hyperbolically headed, "Egyptian Revolution of 2011."

Egypt and King George's olive branch

Mubarak and Condi yuk it up...

Remember the heady days in the middle of the reign of King George II, when a moment of calm, a lull, an eye in the maelstrom of Iraq's civil war, allowed the mad king to dream of democratic contagion. It was argued for a moment that like so many of Kissinger's dominoes the dictatorships of the Middle East were going to morph into peaceful bucolic multi-party democracies. There was the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, that; that is going well. There was also the full-court press on Egyptian President Hosni Murbarak who made just enough of the right noises to pass the muster of Condi Rice. A sad sack herself, she will go down in history as a world-class dupe.

Sadly, the Obama Administration represents continuity within the American Empire rather than fundamental change, as things stand, Veep Joe Biden is now playing the Condi role. Unfortunately, the fire brigades brought in during the mad reign of King George the II, as they did in so many other places, threw fuel, rather than water, on the fire. Egypt has gone from smoldering to smoking. Faux moves toward democracy gave Murbarak what he thought was cover to attempt to squash and imprison leading voices of dissent and plurality. There were no real changes or democratic accommodations. Mubarak, and more importantly the people of Egypt, fully expect his son to succeed him under the status quo ante. America has ignored, to its detriment, any moderates within the powerful Muslim Brotherhood.

Today a full-fledged uprising grips Egypt. Stock market worldwide are tumbling in response. Gold and crude oil prices are soaring.

What a wonderful world.

Toning down the rhetoric

The single best way we have heard someone call for the toning down of the temperature of political rhetoric in America came from an unlikely source, Sports Illustrated pro football columnist Peter King. The Clarion Content is very wary of calls to temper or tamp down political rhetoric because of the concomitant chilling effects on all free speech.

King quoted John F. Kennedy, "Let us begin anew, remember on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

Kennedy was thinking arms control, but the spirit still resonates.

King is a talented writer with a big heart.

What small town rule might look like

Old McAlester High School

Last week the town of McAlester, Oklahoma showed Americans what small town justice might look like, for good and for bad, if left entirely to its own devices. Protesters from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas were in town demonstrating at the funeral of Army Sergeant Jason James McCluskey. Westboro church members are infamous for picketing military funerals across the country, spreading their message that "God hates America" because it tolerates homosexuality.

In McAlester, Oklahoma they were jeered and outshouted by a crowd of more than 1,000 people. More than two dozen cops formed a security cordon around the Westboro protesters. In the end they returned to their mini van to discover two of their tires had been slashed. To quote the Tulsa World, "To make matters worse, as their minivan slowly hobbled away on two flat tires, with a McAlester police car following behind, the protesters were unable to find anyone in town who would repair their vehicle, according to police."

Small town justice.

But it today's America, no such option exists. It has been globalized. The tentacles of Empire reach even to McAlester, Oklahoma. The Tulsa World continues..."The minivan finally pulled over several blocks away in a shopping center parking lot, where AAA was called. A flatbed service truck arrived and loaded up the minivan. Assistant Police Chief Darrell Miller said the minivan was taken to Walmart for repairs."

Bush book prank

There is a movement afoot and a Facebook page dedicated to causing a little fun-loving mischief now that King George the II's new book has come out. The plan is this: Move Bush's memoir to the Crime section of your local bookstore (the Fiction, Science Fiction, and Humor sections are also applicable), take a picture of your handiwork, and post it to the wall of the event page on Facebook.

We highly recommend joining in!

Sponsored by Waging Nonviolence.

Remember it's not just theoretical

Anthem Blue Cross is located in Woodland Hills, CA
#1 Wellpoint Way, Westlake Village, CA 91362

Whatever one thinks of the hash Congress made of the health care bill, it is important to remember that America's health care system is a mess in reality, not just in theory. News out of California served as a reminder of such this week. California's largest for-profit health insurer is substantially raising rates for customers with individual policies.

Folks who have Anthem Blue Cross will see premiums will go up by nearly 40% at the end of March. The company also warned that it may start raising premium more frequently than every twelve months. The corporate scum at Anthem Blue Cross can get away with this as long as they notify the CA State Department of Insurance and show that they are spending at least 70% of premiums on medical care. Where is the Unabomber when we need him? We are quite sure he could deliver a special message to these greedy leaders about how the public feels about this kind of profiteering. Anthem is a subsidiary of WellPoint Inc. According to the Los Angeles Times the company announced an eightfold increase in profit for the last three months of 2009.

Americans who are prisoners of the political gridlock in Washington, D.C. (and in this case Sacramento) will accept a lot under the rubric of democracy, freedom and the American dream, but at some point their frustration will boil over and they will seek solutions outside of the system that has failed them. When frustrations reach a boiling point, it will be difficult to control the (seemingly spontaneous) reaction.

Frank Rich on point

It is a mighty rare day when the Clarion Content agrees wholeheartedly with liberal ideologue and New York Times columnist Frank Rich. However, we think he got the tone and tenor of what the Massachusetts Senatorial election signifies about the mindset of American electorate just right.

Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.

That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.

David Brooks and others who have written about the erosion of the American meritocracy, especially in things like college admissions, have sounded this alarm previously, and been ignored. Obama road this anti-elitist wave of anger to power, but has yet to provide any solutions. Until the ground shook this week he was kowtowing to the bankers' man, Timothy Geithner. In the Clarion Content's view the critiques of his health care bill as patently corporatist and written by lobbyists were accurate. Kennedy and Reagan both struggled in their first years, it is not too late for Obama to pivot. Now is the time. This is an inflection point. Can Obama adapt or is he a Clintonista proclaiming a "3rd Way" to appease while pushing the same old agenda?

A harbinger or two

What is over that next hill?

The Clarion Content stumbled across a two notes this week that we wondered if were harbingers. As regular readers know, although our hope is that the global economic turbulence has peaked and the world economy has bottomed out, we are not confident that is the case. In support of our concerned point of view we read an intriguing analysis in the Christian Science Monitor about the opening of the world's tallest building.

Come again you say?

Well according to the Monitor, when the newest "world's tallest building" opened this Monday in Dubai it was "an exuberant architectural triumph in the middle of a deep economic swamp." The Monitor notes that, "It's often that way. The tallest skyscrapers always seem to pop up just as the economy is headed down." They have interesting graph noting some of the previous correlations of new "world's tallest building" title holders and economic slumps. Their theory is "The skyscraper index works because developers tend to make ambitious gambles with huge new towers at the point of the business cycle when interest-rate and price signals can get distorted." They cite the Austrian School economist Mark Thorton. The Austrian School's austere teachings have been popping up more frequently in these hard economic times.

The second harbinger was from a political stability angle rather than an economic one. But perhaps, it is the way in which the world economy has wobbled that prompted the rarely hysterical Economist to run a chart of the day under the heading of "Global Tinderbox." The chart shows a world map that rates countries by their state of potential combustibility in 2010. Their conclusion? 2010 could be a year that sparks unrest.

Dark portends.

Iran

The Clarion Content approves of the walk softly path the President Barack Obama is treading with Iran. That Iran's most recent elections were dirty is hardly in doubt, the ability of the United States to do something effective about it is much more nebulous. We are glad that President recognized that massive overreach by the last United States' President destabilized democracies and pseudo-democracies the world over from Thailand to Pakistan.

The statistical analysis from one of the most fascinating political bloggers, the FiveThirtyEight, is why we are convinced Iran's elections were fraudulent. The will of the people is the most important lever to the control of a society, far more relevant than external actions.

Attack on the grid

Tens of thousands of Northern Californians were without Internet access, landline or wireless phone services after sabotage apparently severed fiber optic cables. Word is someone(s) opened manhole covers in San Jose and San Carlos, south of San Francisco, in the pre-dawn hours Friday morning and cut several fiber optic cables belonging to AT&T and Sprint. The New York Times reports approximately 52,000 Verizon landline and wireless customers were also affected. Because AT&T provides the fiber connections that link cell phone towers to their respective networks, wireless subscribers from almost every carrier were also affected by the attack. Some Verizon Communications DSL customers also lost service, because their system uses AT&T fiber-optic cables to send its data traffic to its own nationwide network.

Strange story: from Israel

There is a serious global recession underway. Waves of populist anger are sweeping through places where they have been heretofore unseen. This story from the Los Angeles Times about looting in Israel, a liberal democracy, came as a surprise. The LA Times reports that, "The [Israeli] economy is expected to shrink 1.5% this year, according to the Bank of Israel, compared with growth rates of 4% or more in the previous five years... [It] also forecasts an 11% decline in Israeli exports, which account for half the value of everything the country produces."

The looting occurred at a supermarket in the region of northern Israel called Galilee. It closed without paying workers their final two-months wages. They were laid-off and the store manager disappeared. Subordinates left in charge told employees they could take their due in goods, but the situation spiraled out of control. The LA Times says,

"They rifled through their shuttered workplace, helping themselves to crates full of groceries.

As word spread through the small town, the store's jilted creditors joined in. They dismantled the light fixtures, ripped out wiring and absconded with the cash registers, even as television cameras rolled.

Within hours the parking lot was jammed with ordinary shoppers. They left car engines running and brought their children to help pick the shelves clean. Finally even the shelves were hauled away, leaving latecomers to scrounge the floor for leftover fruit."

This was not the first looting incident in Israel this year. A bankrupt hotel saw a similar scavenging when it bailed on banquets and weddings for which it had already taken deposits.

Of course, Americans can hardly say they have never seen such things. The Clarion Content just thought it was a ominous sign of times to see it happening in an economic tiger like Israel.

A post on the Post

The Clarion Content has observed the controversy surrounding the cartoon published last week in the New York Post from afar. We will not be linking to it directly. Here in Durham we have been unable to formulate a coherent perspective on the situation. Luckily we have a guest columnist from Morris County, New Jersey with a short take. Take it away AnthemSled...

It seems to me the real story here is that the Post, full of sour grapes and slouching towards irrelevance, decided to print this [cartoon] knowing that they could bait their favorite punching bag Al Sharpton into criticizing them for something they could defend with a shrug, "We're not racist, just obtuse and unfunny!" meanwhile helping white males to feel like they are the ones being persecuted. I can't really boycott the Post, cause I never buy it anyway.

The tragedy here is that all the lefty vehemence against the Post right now is giving them exactly what they were looking for - publicity.

Links do not imply endorsement. Food for thought only...

A different perspective

Perhaps you read the Clarion Content's reporting a few days back on the rioting in Athens, Greece. We noted that Greece has a long tradition of street violence. High unemployment among youth, a stagnating economy, and rising expectations after hosting the Olympics seemed to us the tinder, the spark was the shooting of an affluent youth who was participating in actions against authority. The Clarion Content viewed (and views) these riots as very unlikely to spread beyond Greece's borders to more general international unrest, ala 1848 or 1968.

However, a certain Illinoisan blogger we read has other thoughts. He provocatively asks what we happen if, "the citizens of Illinois challenged their state government the way young people are challenging the national government in Greece?" He cites personal disgust for Governor Blagojevich's corruption case and Illinois' "politics as usual" mindset. He is inspired and calls out young Illini, "politically engaged citizens in the streets confronting their government - young people who reject complacency and refuse to accept conditions that others have imposed upon them. Yes, a better world is always possible if you're willing to partake in the struggle to bring it about."

Sadly, the youth of Illinois, like those of East Lansing, Michigan or Columbus, Ohio seem far more prepared to riot over the outcome of a sporting event, than against the ineptitude and corruption of their state's governor. The current Illinois governor's corrupt predecessor, George Ryan, is now serving time in prison and begging George Bush II for a pardon.

Athens riots

Picture from NY Times

Here at the Clarion Content we have been ignoring the riots in Athens, and other parts of Greece for days. By choice. A cop shoots a rich kid and they riot? How un-American! Why not just sue? In America when a poor kid gets shot there might be riots, but a rich kid? How would his friends find out, by checking their Facebooks? What a way to start a riot...

But, folks keep emailing us about the riots. Maybe it is the concurrence with the financial crisis that has people so geeked up about it? We didn't hear anything last year when the youths of Paris burned many parked cars, and shot at the police, among other things, after two teens were killed fleeing the cops. Is it 1848 all over again?(better) Or 1968?(worse)

We did read today that sympathy protests were planned in Moscow and Madrid. Anything come of it? Anyone think anything is likely to come of it? Greece has a long tradition of mayhem in the street, in Europe, it is maybe second only to France. According to the Times of London, "there were 902 demonstrations in Athens last year that closed the central square at a cost to the economy of some £1.3 billion."